The third installment of the MMA journalism roundtable at MMA Opinion has been posted. Today’s topic–breaking news vs. accurate news. Here’s the first part of my response but y’all will just have to go over there to read the rest:

Obviously there should be an effort made to be accurate. Passing vague rumors off as fact is bad form. On the other hand, the fight business is somewhat unique in that yesterday’s enemies are tomorrow’s business partners. Fighters and promoters may say one thing on one day and something completely different the next. Ultimately, it’s all situational—if I write an article that a fighter is a transvestite hooker in his spare time I better well have some exhaustively verified information. Really, even that isn’t really newsworthy unless its impacting his performance in the ring. If a fighter tells me that he’s probably going to fight in the main event of an upcoming card and it gets changed, I’m not losing a lot of sleep over it. Time sensitivity doesn’t negate this concept—it’s all very situational.

In the recent case of Dana’s tirade against Cro Cop, there were a good many players in the MMA media that rushed to get the story out but they had no intention of putting it into perspective. There are those who’d repeat it verbatim as fact if Dana White said that Anderson Silva trained by running back and forth across Lake Mead. Clearly, that’s not good form from a number of standpoints. Ultimately, we try not to worry about what everyone else is doing. We try to do a good job and report on the sport in a manner that we think is professional and that we can be proud of. There’s too much going on to get too self obsessed about the macro view of MMA media. If someone disagrees with something we’ve said that’s their right. We do very little ‘censorship’ of comments—if we could get away with it and not be inundated with spam I wouldn’t moderate them at all. The only time I amend comments is to tone down obscenities. Otherwise, if someone makes a valid point it goes up. If they have some sort of philosophical issue with what or how we’ve reported on something we’re willing to listen. Honestly, in the 18 months or so we’ve been online there’s not really been any complaints about our work on philosophical grounds.

MMA journalism roundtable: breaking news v. accurate news @ MMA Opinion